Now let us turn together to 1
Peter, 1 Peter chapter 1. I should begin reading at verse
13 and read to the end of the chapter. 1 Peter chapter 1 and
verse 13. Wherefore, girding up the loins
of your mind, be sober and set your hope perfectly on the grace
that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. As children of obedience, not
fashioning yourselves according to your former lusts in the time
of your ignorance, but like as he who called you is holy, Be
yourselves also holy in all manner of living, because it is written,
You shall be holy, for I am holy. And if you call on Him as Father,
who without respect of persons judges according to each man's
work, pass the time of your sojourning in fear, knowing that you were
redeemed not with corruptible things, with silver or gold,
from your vain manner of life handed down from your fathers,
but with precious blood as of a lamb without blemish and without
spot, even the blood of Christ, who was foreknown indeed before
the foundation of the world, but was manifested at the end
of the times for your sake, who through him are believers in
God that raised him from the dead and gave him glory so that
your faith and hope might be in God. Seeing you have purified
your souls in your obedience to the truth unto unfeigned love
of the brethren, love one another from the heart fervently. having been begotten again, not
of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God, which
lives and abides. For all flesh is as grass, and
all the glory thereof as the flower of grass. The grass withers,
and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord abides forever. And this is the word of good
tidings, which was preached unto you. Now I'd like to ask you a question
as we begin our study of the Word of God this morning. The
question is very simple. What were your thoughts as I
read in your hearing this paragraph in Peter's letter to these scattered
believers dwelling in those five Roman provinces of what was then
called Asia Minor, now the land of Turkey. Did the familiar words
just run over your mind because you've heard them read on a number
of occasions at the front end of our studies in First Peter?
Or did you reflect briefly on the structure of this portion
of the Word of God, beginning to get a feel for where Peter
is going in his pastoral exhortations to these believers? Or did some
of the verses that we've not been reading, namely verses 22
to 25, coming with a degree of freshness, did certain words
in them provoke inquiry in your mind? I wonder what that means.
I wonder what Pastor will say about that phrase, about that
particular nuance of Peter's concern. Or were you just plain
bored and wondering, when can I go home and get my lunch? Well,
you know what you were thinking, and God knows what you were thinking,
as this paragraph of his holy and infallible word was read
in your hearing. But I would entreat you, whatever
your thoughts may have been, and I may not have even come
close to touching what yours were, but whatever your thoughts
were, may I plead with you, for the good of your own souls, that
you seek consciously to give your outer ears to an undistracted
hearing of this word, and even more so, pray that God will enable
you to hear with the ears of your heart this portion of God's
word which God himself describes as a living and an abiding word. a word which under the blessing
of God can impart and sustain life that never dies. Well, after the common greeting
of a letter that would be regarded a respectable communication in
the first century of the Greco-Roman world, Peter launches in in verses
3 to 12 to this marvelous eulogy, blessing God for the great salvation
he has conferred upon hell-deserving sinners. And after opening up
something of that great salvation, he begins in verse 13, as I have
told you week after week, with the first of a cycle, a number
of cycles of pastoral exhortation. In the light of all of their
privileges conferred by the grace of God, Peter writes, wherefore,
here is the kind of life that you are to live in the light
of the privileges God has conferred upon you. And in that first cycle
of pastoral exhortations, he focuses upon the Christian life
in relationship primarily to God. And in relationship to God,
it is to be a life marked by hope, verse 13, by holiness,
verses 14 to 16, and by an appropriate fear, verses 17 to 21. And at that point, and that's
where our expositions have taken us through verse 21, it's as
though Peter pauses in his own mind And as he thinks of these
elect sojourners of the dispersion there in Asia Minor, having directed
them to the kind of life they are to live with respect to God,
a life of hope, a life of holiness, a life of appropriate fear, it's
as though he pauses and says to these elect sojourners, now
as hope burns in your eye and you anticipate the great salvation
in Christ, much of which is yet to come, And as you seek to frame
your life in holiness, because the One who called you is holy,
and you walk before Him in an appropriate fear, born of your
knowledge of God as Father and impartial Judge, and your awareness
of the awesome price of your redemption, stop and look around
you. And as you look around you, Peter
says, you're going to discover You have some fellow travelers. There are around you others in
whose spiritual eyes hope burns. There are around you others who
are pursuing a life of universal holiness. There are others who
are walking in that fear appropriate to calling upon God as father
and impartial judge and knowing that you've been redeemed at
a tremendous price. And now I want to say something
to you elect sojourners that has to do not primarily with
your relationship to God, but with your relationship to these
fellow travelers. And so beginning in verse 22,
he writes, seeing you have purified your souls in your obedience
to the truth unto unfamed love of the brethren, love one another
from the heart fervently, having been begotten again. And central
to this section of the paragraph, verses 22 to 25, is that single
imperative, love one another. He had given his first imperative
in verse 13, set your hope. The second imperative, be holy. The third imperative, pass the
time of your sojourning in fear. Now he comes with his fourth
imperative, love one another. And everything in these verses
either flows into or flows out of this central command to love
one another. If you had the privilege of looking
at this passage in the original text, this is abundantly clear,
and they would have understood when they heard this letter first
read to them. that from these dimensions of
the Christian life, which focus primarily on living before God
in hope, in holiness and fear, Peter was now, as it were, turning
their eyes from being upward to the horizontal relationships
and is saying, you are in this with others and with respect
to one another. And that word in the original
comes first, one another. Be loving, out of a pure heart,
and that fervently. Well, I hope that gives you a
little feel for the structure of the passage, and now what
we'll be doing over the next two expositions is considering,
first of all, the prerequisites for exercising brotherly love,
and then in a subsequent exposition, the precept mandating brotherly
love. But this morning we'll have time
only to address ourselves to what I'm calling the prerequisites
for exercising brotherly love. As Peter contemplates his desire
as a pastor, as a shepherd in Christ's flock, to give direction
to these struggling believers who are living in a hostile climate.
He now desires to lay upon them this central Christian duty of
mutual love. But he does not lay that duty
upon them in isolation from the realities of their spiritual
experience. And so I'm describing those things
as the prerequisites for exercising brotherly love. the way in which
Peter sets it out, it's like a verbal sandwich. And I said,
Lord, I hate to liken your word to a sandwich, especially coming
up to midday. I don't want to get people's
minds distracted from the preaching to their lunch. But I didn't
know a better way. What you have in the middle of
the sandwich, that which constitutes the real nutrition in that sandwich,
the part that is in the middle between the two slices, is the
command, love one another fervently. But on top of it is this slice
of verse 22, seeing you have purified your souls in your obedience
to the truth unto unfeigned love, That's the slice on top of the
center of the sandwich, and then the slice on the bottom is verse
23, having been begotten again. So that as Peter gives this imperative
to love one another, he sees it sandwiched between these two
realities. The reality of their purification
of the soul, and the reality of their new birth. And he does
not address this fundamental Christian duty in isolation. He sandwiches it between the
reality of their experience of the purifying of their souls
and the reality of their experience of the new birth. Now, for some
of the kids who say, what does the big word prerequisite mean? Well, that means something you've
got to have ahead of time or you can't get what you want.
Before long, some of you will be enrolling in various courses
in college, and you may see a certain course offered, English Literature
102, and it will say prerequisite
English Literature 101. If you don't take English Literature
101, they won't enroll you in English Literature 102. That's
a prerequisite, something required beforehand. It is required, it's
requisite, but it is required pre, before. And Peter here clearly
identifies the prerequisites for the exercising of brotherly
love. If we would obey the command
to love one another from the heart, possibly from a pure heart,
and that fervently, on a stretch, intensely, these prerequisites
must be part and parcel of our own spiritual experience. Now the first of them is the
purification of the soul. Look at the language of the text.
Seeing you have purified your souls in your obedience to the
truth unto unfeigned love of the brethren, love one another.
Since you have Therefore, do, in the light of this reality
in your own experience, I am now directing you to the fulfillment
of this duty. Now let's ask three questions
of this statement of Peter. First of all, what is this purification
of the soul? Question number two, how was
this purification effected? And thirdly, to what end was
this purification effected? First of all then, what is this
purification of the soul? The word Peter uses, seeing you
have purified your souls, is a word that can refer to mere
ceremonial purification. It's used this way in John 11
in verse 55. Many went up to Jerusalem to
purify themselves, that is, to undergo a ritual of purification. It never promised any internal
purification. There was no assurance that those
who went through the rituals had anything done to them internally. But the same word is used to
point to a real inward moral and spiritual purification in
several passages in the New Testament. In James chapter 4 in verse 8,
James calls upon his readers to purify their hearts. That is, to experience a real
inward, moral, spiritual purification. 1 John 3 in verse 3, Every man
who has this hope in him, the hope of the coming of Christ,
And in that hope that we shall be like him, for we shall see
him as he is, John says, everyone who has this hope in him goes
on purifying himself even as he is pure. The purity of God
and of Christ is not ceremonial. It is moral. It is ethical. It is real. And John says, all
who have hope that they will share in that perfection of purity
go on purifying themselves with a real internal cleansing, a
separation from all that is morally and spiritually defiling unto
that which is pure and clean. The unclean person morally and
spiritually is unfit both for communion with God and for service
rendered to God. So Peter assumes that those to
whom he writes have experienced this fundamental purification
and he uses a form of the verb which means they were purified
definitively at a point in time and the results of that purification
continue to the present hour. You have purified your souls. You have cleansed, you have removed
your souls from the realm of defilement into a sphere of purity
and sanctity. What is the purification of the
soul? I trust you now could answer.
Secondly, how was this purification effective? Again, look at our
text. Seeing you have purified your
souls, how? in your obedience to the truth. In your obedience to the truth. According to Peter, they purified
their souls when they gave themselves up to the power of truth. And what was that truth? Well,
that truth was nothing more or nothing less than the gospel
that had been preached to them. Peter has already referred to
it earlier in the chapter in verse 13, verse 12, to whom it
was revealed that not unto themselves but unto you did they minister
these things which have now been announced unto you through them
that preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Spirit sent
down from heaven. And that gospel, according to
the previous context, was a gospel that focused on the sufferings
of Christ and the glories that should follow. The simple, straightforward,
apostolic gospel that holds forth Jesus Christ in the uniqueness
of his person and in the perfection of his work as the only way by
which sinners can approach to a holy God. And now, Peter says,
you there in Asia Minor, you have purified your souls in your
obedience to the truth, where a saving response to the gospel
is described as obedience to the truth, what Paul calls in
another setting the obedience of faith. And it's interesting
that Peter, using similar terminology in Acts 15 and verse 9, speaks
of the Gentiles who purified their hearts or cleansed their
hearts by faith. Well, is the heart cleansed by
faith or by obedience? Well, in this setting, you don't
set up an either-or structure. When Peter says, you purified
your souls by or in your obedience to the truth, he is simply describing
the saving response of a penitent, believing heart in the presence
of the gospel. When we believe what the gospel
announces, we can do but one thing, and that's to give ourselves
up to those realities. Hence, Paul can say in Romans
6, 17, you obeyed from the heart the form of teaching unto which
you were delivered. And there he beautifully describes
a saving response to the gospel. God delivers the sinner who's
in a state of condemnation and spiritual death. He delivers
him over to the very contours of gospel truth. That's how he
saves him. He becomes a A gospel-contoured
man or woman, his thoughts about God and sin and forgiveness are
shaped by the gospel. And when those thoughts are shaped
by the gospel, the whole of his life begins to be shaped by the
gospel. So as Peter identifies the first
prerequisite to exercise brotherly love as purification of the soul,
in answer to the question, what is it? It is a real, internal,
ethical, moral, purifying work. How is it effected? By a saving
response to the gospel, described in Peter's words as obedience
to the truth. Question number three. To what
end is this purification effected? When God, through the gospel,
effects this purification, what end does He have in view? Well,
if we were to search the Scriptures, we would find God has many ends
in view. But because Peter is preparing
his readers to receive this central, focused mandate to love one another,
He lifts out but one of the ends that God has in view when he
brings people to experience the purification of the soul effected
by the gospel, and notice how he describes it. Seeing you've
purified your souls in your obedience to the truth unto unfeigned love
of the brethren. You see what Peter is saying?
He's saying this purification is unto this end that you might
experience non-hypocritical, real, genuine, brotherly affection. And here he uses the word from
which we get the name of that city a hundred miles south of
us, Philadelphia. Speaking of brotherly love, and
he tells these people that when by the power of the gospel you
were brought to the obedience of the truth, it was unto this
end that you might be able to experience genuine brotherly
love. Now can you put these things
together? What's the relationship between the purification of the
soul and the ability to experience brotherly love? Well, the connection
is simply this. We'll see more of it when we
come to chapter 2 and verse 1. All of those horrible poisons
of the soul that keep us in a state of enmity, jealousy, bitterness,
ill will, suspicion, animosity, unforgiveness. All of those wretched,
horrible, poisonous dispositions of the soul that keep men at
one another's throats and make it morally and ethically impossible
truly to experience familial, brotherly affection from the
heart. God purifies the soul of a host
of poisonous and noxious, evil, damnable things. Peter focuses
upon the purification of the soul of those things that make
genuine brotherly affection impossible. And so he says, seeing you have
purified your souls in your obedience to the truth unto unfeigned love
of the brethren, love one another. Since you have known the purification
of the soul, that purification which is unto non-hypocritical
love, love one another from the heart fervently. The word for the love of the
brethren was used in the secular world to describe the love that
existed among natural siblings, but it's never used that way
in the New Testament. It is always used to describe
the unique, the peculiar love of the twice-born family of God. It is the love of the spiritual
brotherhood, as one has helpfully stated it. It is not to love
as though these people were our brothers, but it is to love because
they are our brothers. Not to play a head game and say,
well, I'm going to love them as though they were. No, it's
I love them because they are my brothers. And this is to be
done, the text says, without hypocrisy, unfeigned love. It's interesting that this conjunction
of love that is unhypocritical, it's the word hypocrite with
the alpha privative in front, non-hypocritical love. Paul emphasizes
it in Romans 12, 9. He speaks of it as one of his
own character traits in 2 Corinthians 6 and verse 6. And Peter understands
that if people are ever genuinely to love as brothers, that there
must be this purification of the soul. Without it, there will
either be the open manifestation of the absence of love, or a
mere hypocritical display of something that looks like love. And therefore he says, seeing
you have purified your souls in your obedience to the truth
unto unfeigned love of the brethren, now you're in a posture to begin
to truly love, love one another from a pure heart, fervently. Before we pass on to the second
prerequisite I want us to pause and note some of the vital truths
that Peter is underscoring as he focuses upon this first prerequisite. Do you see, first of all, that
when Peter writes these words, he's assuming that all men by
nature have a polluted, defiled, and an unclean soul. Do you see
that? If all of these elect sojourners
there in these five Roman provinces, if they were not by nature defiled,
unclean, and polluted in soul, why in the world would Peter
ever write and say, seeing you have purified your souls? You don't purify something already
pure. You don't cleanse that which
needs no cleansing. And Peter is assuming that regardless
of the difference in social status, difference in religious background,
differences of external moral patterns of behavior, every one
of these people, without exception, was part of Adam's defiled, polluted,
and unclean race. And here in this warm, practical
pastoral letter, it's amazing, in a setting in which he's about
to urge the duty of loving one another, Peter dumps this massive
load of the biblical doctrine of the universal and total depravity
of man's nature. That's where he puts it. And
you see, we'll have no appreciation. For the wonder of the grace of
God, and the attainability of this imperative to love one another,
if we have tried to skirt around the reality of the native condition
of our souls, as polluted, defiled, and unclean. Remember what Jesus
said? They that are healthy, they have
no need of a doctor, but those who are what? I did not come
to call the righteous. put sinners to repentance. And
in the setting, he's talking about these Pharisees who were
offended that Jesus is having a banquet, a banquet thrown by
Matthew, the publican, the outcast, the unclean one in the eyes of
his fellow Jews. And the Lord has called this
man to himself and to celebrate the goodness and mercy of Christ.
Matthew spreads the banquet hall and invites in the Palestinian
mafia and riffraff. These Pharisees are offended.
Jesus is hobnobbing the sinners, notorious sinners, and he says,
the problem with you Pharisees is, you've never come to grips
with your native pollution, vileness, and uncleanness, and until you
do, I will be nothing to you. I did not come to call the righteous
but sinners. And my friend, as then, so now. It will never be said of you,
seeing you have purified your soul, in your obedience to the
truth unto unfeigned love of the brethren until you own your
native pollution and defilement and uncleanness. But you say,
I'm not polluted, I'm not perfect, but polluted, vile, unclean,
I'm offended by such language. Yes, I'm not surprised you are. But God says he resists the proud. and gives grace to the humble.
When Jesus is about to give a mosaic of a description of all the sons
and daughters of the kingdom, you remember the first beatitude?
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of
heaven. The first work God does in drawing
any sinner to himself is to show that sinner how much he needs
what only Christ can give him. And he strips him down until
he owns his true native spiritual poverty. Paul could say in 1
Timothy 1.15, this is a faithful saying worthy of all acceptation. Christ Jesus came into the world,
sinners to save. And it's only when we place ourselves
in that category without reservation that we will ever know the saving
mercy. of the Lord Jesus. So Peter,
just setting out the first prerequisite to brotherly love is affirming
that all of us by nature have polluted, defiled, and unclean
souls. Second thing he's highlighting
is this, that souls are truly purified by one means alone. Souls are really, truly purified
by one means alone. What does that mean? Seeing you
have purified your souls in your obedience to the truth. To the truth! The means God has
ordained for the purification of the soul is not error, not
falsehood, not lovely religious notions suffused with earnestness
and sincerity. It doesn't matter what you believe
so long as you believe it and live by it. What nonsense! God
has ordained His truth to be the instrument of the purification
of the soul. It was by their obedience to
the objective revelation of truth, not nebulous, subjective, spiritual
ideas, which if believed sincerely, regardless of what you believe,
and it does you good, you're purified. No. According to Titus
1.1, it is the truth and the truth alone which accords with
godliness and is the mother and the father of godliness. This is why we must jealously
guard the truth. People say, well, you know, in
a world that is so fractured and a religious community that
is so confused, can't we just drop right-angled distinctions? And if we believe something about
God, and something about goodness, and something about the hope
of an after life, and something about virtue, can't we all just
get in a big love fest and gush? Well, some of us would love to
do that. But we can't do it so long as we have our Bible. We
believe that to believe a lie is to be damned, according to
the Scriptures. God shall send them strong delusion
that they shall believe a lie, and they might be damned who
receive not the love of the truth. Lies destroy, and mere human
notions have no power to transform. It is the truth, as the truth
is in Jesus, which alone is the instrument of the purification
of the soul. There's a third truth Peter highlights
in these words. It is the truth of the gospel
coming, demanding a response of joyful submission. Peter can
describe their saving response as obedience to the truth, because
that's what the gospel demands, and wherever it's received, that's
what it secures. You see, the gospel does not
float by us with a bunch of propositions saying, tip your hat to the propositions
and all is well. The propositions come into the
field of your awareness, you tip your hat, like a passing
display in a parade. If you particularly like and
you clap while it passes by, it doesn't affect you before
or after, it gives you a momentary aesthetic thrill and you respond,
but the object of your delight goes on its way, you go on your
way, there's no connection, there's no impress, there's no impact,
there's no governing power, not the gospel. when the gospel comes
within our view, and out of that gospel comes the marvelous declaration
that the God who could destroy us all, has sent His only begotten
Son, and that in the person and work of Christ there is forgiveness
and acceptance with God, the pardon of all of our sins, meekness
for communion with God and fellowship with Him forever, and the pledge
of a resurrection body. When that gospel comes with power,
we give ourselves up to that gospel as we give ourselves up
to the Savior, who is the focal point of that gospel. And then
the whole of life is regulated by that truth until we see him
face to face and faith is turned to sight. Peter's emphasizing
that, that the truth of the gospel comes to us, demanding a response
of joyful submission. And therefore, we continue to
take our stand against what was called a generation ago, easy
believism. Faith is simple, yes, but the
notion that faith is a mere shuffling of the intellectual furniture,
taking in a few propositions about Jesus and His cross, that
is not the teaching of the Word of God. Peter can say, you've
purified your souls in your obedience to the truth. using a form of
the verb that emphasizes the obedience to the truth began
and continues when he uses the word you have purified the purification
began and continues and it did so in the context of obedience
to the truth and then the final thing that he's emphasizing in
this passage is this that a joyful submission to the truth will
always have horizontal as well as vertical effects. You see
what he says? You've purified your souls in
your obedience to the truth unto, he could have said, unto communion
with God. And that would be true. Unto
fellowship with Christ. That would be true. He says in
chapter 3, in verse 18, Christ died for us, the just for the
unjust, that he might bring us to God. There's the verticalism
of the end of the gospel. But here, Peter says, In purifying
your souls in your obedience to the truth, it was unto non-hypocritical
brotherly love. Underscoring that when the gospel
is received in faith and there is a joyful submission to the
truth, it will always have horizontal implications as well as vertical. And as we shall see, God willing,
as background reading, and I would urge you, if you have the time,
to go through the book of First John and read all the sections
where love of the brethren is given as an indispensable mark
of the new birth. He that loves not knows not God. He who does not have this horizontal
impact of the gospel has never known any real vertical impact
of the gospel. John says, if you say you love
God whom you haven't seen, you have real vertical communion
with God, and you don't love your brother whom you have seen,
you're self-deluded. Now the gospel doesn't begin
with its vertical implications, but it doesn't end with its,
I'm sorry, it doesn't begin with its horizontal implications,
but neither does it end with its vertical implications. God
not only blows off the roof of our alienation from him, he knocks
down the walls of our alienation from our fellow man. And he brings
us into fellowship with himself and into face-to-face communion
with his people. And he assumes that this has
happened to every single one of the believers in Asia Minor.
He doesn't say seeing some of you who have been more earnest
and more sincere and more prayerful and more devout have purified
your souls. No, seeing you have, all of you,
all of you who are elect sojourners, insofar as the root of the matter
is in you, you have all without exception purified your souls
in your obedience to the truth unto unfeigned love of the brethren. That's prerequisite number one.
If you don't know in your experience what Peter's describing here,
you cannot love the brethren. Can't do it. You haven't taken
English Lit 101, and you won't get enrolled in English Lit 102. But then there's a second prerequisite
to brotherly love, and it's the divine begetting. Notice how
Peter puts it. after giving then the mandate,
love one another from the heart fervently, and that must await
a subsequent exposition, having been begotten again, not of corruptible
seed, but of incorruptible, through the word of God which lives and
abides. The second prerequisite is the
new birth, or if you like it better, the divine begetting.
Now notice, Peter does not say, love one another from the heart
fervently, so that you may be begotten again." He's not commanding
love as a means to the divine begetting, but he's saying love,
having been begotten. And he uses a form of the verb
that, like the purification, points to action in the past,
the result of which obtains and continues to the present. He
says, here is the second prerequisite to your loving one another. You
have purified your souls, that was your activity consciously
in your conversion. But now Peter's going to go behind
their activity and focus upon God's activity. Behind their
purification, you Greek students, you've got a perfect active participle
with the purifying. You, having purified your souls,
now you have a perfect pastor, having been begotten again. And he says, behind your purification
of your souls in your obedience to the truth unto unfeigned love
of the brethren, is the almighty, gracious activity of God in the
new birth, in the divine begetting. In the first prerequisite, Peter
focused on what they consciously did in their conversion. He now
goes deeper and says that behind what you did is what God did
in the divine begetting. Now again, let's ask three questions
of the text. Question number one, we've already
hinted at the answer, who does the begetting? Well, it's not
said in the text, it just says, having been begotten again. And
when you have a passive verb, you've got to ask, who did it?
When I take my handkerchief and say, I pick up the handkerchief,
I am the subject, actively I pick it up. If I say, my handkerchief
was picked up, that's passive. Now you've got to ask, who done
the picking? Who picked it? I've not told
you. I've said my handkerchief was picked up 30 seconds ago.
Who picked it up? Peter says, having been begotten
again. There was an activity of begetting.
You didn't beget yourselves. You were begotten. There was
a begetting. Well, who did it? Well, he had
already answered that in chapter 1 and verse 3. Look at chapter
1, verse 3. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, who according to his great mercy, same word in the
original, begot us again. God the Father begot us again. The divine begetting is just
that. It is the begetting of God. explicitly stated in texts such
as James 118, of His own will. He brought us forth. A different
word, but the same idea. He brought us forth by the word
of His truth. Or John 1, 12 and 13, as many
as received Him. To them may be the right to become
the children of God, even to them that believe on His name,
which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh,
nor of the will of man. but of God. Who does the begetting? God does. And Peter is unashamed to tell
these common ordinary people This, that some would say, is
high and abstruse theology, that in the new birth, God acts monergistically,
that is, God alone puts forth the energy of His grace and begets
new life. Who does the begetting? God does. Second question, what is this
divine begetting? When Peter says, having been
begotten again, What is he actually referring to? What happened in
these people? What is the divine begetting? Well, it is nothing less than
the imparting of spiritual life to a previously dead soul. You see, the biblical doctrine
of sin is even more humbling than one that states we are vile,
polluted, and unclean. It says by nature we are spiritually
dead. Ephesians 2 and verse 1, And
you hath he made alive who were dead through your trespasses
and sins. And in the divine beginning God
imparts life to a dead soul. The basis of the Christian life,
as one has said, is nothing less than the actual participation
in a new God-given life. You see, it is not a mere shuffling
of the intellectual furniture, where once I didn't have a piece
of furniture in my head called Jesus and his life and his death
and his resurrection. Now I put some furniture up there
in my head. I've got some furniture with
Christian terms on it. No, that is not the imparting
of a new life. You can fill the head with furniture
that has all kinds of Christian tags on it and not know the impartation
of new God given life. It is not the mere agitation
of the emotional circuitry. Some people think they're born
again because at a given place, under something that had to do
with Christ and the cross and the gospel, they got tingles
from the top of their head to the sole of their feet, or from
the sole of their feet to the top of their head, or left to
right, from the fingertips on the left hand to the right. They
wept, they laughed, they barked like dogs. And they say, I must
be born again. I felt divine life. No, all they
felt was some emotions going over their emotional circuitry
that had nothing to do with truth and repentance and faith and
moral transformation. What is this divine begetting?
Not a shuffling of the intellectual furniture, not an agitation of
the emotional circuitry in the presence of some truth, nor is
it merely a disruption of some volitional and ethical patterns
of life. I'm going to choose to be more
kind to my wife, more honest at work. I'm going to choose
to be a more diligent, upright citizen. I'm going to make some
alterations in my ethical and volitional life. That's not the
impartation of a new divinely begotten life. That's why Jesus
said, except a man be born anew, he cannot enter the kingdom.
Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. It is nothing less, this divine
begetting, than the impartation of a new God give in life. God imparts no new faculties.
We had a mind before this life, we have a mind afterwards. We
had a will before, we have a will afterward. We have emotions,
we have all of our... God doesn't impart new faculties,
but he imparts new life that radically transforms how we use
those faculties so that God can say, if any man be in Christ,
he is a new creation. We are his workmanship, created
anew in union with Christ unto good works which God has before
prepared that we should walk in them. Now, question number
three, how is this divine begetting effected? Look at our text. If
God is the author of it, if it is nothing less than the imparting
of new divine life, How is it effected? How does God bring
it about? Look at the text. Having been
begotten again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible through
the word of God which lives and abides. How is this divine begetting
effected? Well, just like he did with the
ransom price, you who are here for the exposition remember,
When Peter's going to tell us what the ransom price is in verse
18, he does so with the negative positive structure, knowing that
you were redeemed not with corruptible things, with silver and gold,
verse 19, but positively with precious blood. Well, Peter,
being the good teacher that he is, he does the same thing here. When he's going to tell us how
this divine begetting is effected, he starts with the negative.
Notice how he describes it. Having been begotten again, not
of corruptible seed. Now the commentators and the
exegetes and the philologists and lexicographers debate the
precise meaning of the word seed. It's used only here in this form
in the New Testament. But there is a consensus that
most likely, since he's talking about divine begetting, he's
using the word seed as referring to that which begins life. He is speaking figuratively in
the use of this word in conjunction with procreation. And he says,
we have been begotten again, not of corruptible seed. that is not of seed that has
anything to do with this present world order which eventually
will perish. It's the word that we encountered
earlier in conjunction with our inheritance in verse 4. To an
inheritance incorruptible. Here is the word corruptible
with that alpha priveted in front, non-corruptible, but the root
word corruptible. We have an inheritance that will
never fade, an inheritance that will know no atrophy. We have
an inheritance over which the words dying and death will never
be written. Well, Peter says, we've been
begotten of seed that is not corruptible. If we were begotten
of corruptible seed, then the life which that seed begets would
be corruptible. For Jesus said that which is
born of the flesh is flesh. Corruptible seed produces offspring
that is corruptible. And Peter says our reception
of new divine life was not by corruptible seed, but rather
positively. He says it is incorruptible,
the same quality as your inheritance, that which will never know any
atrophy, that which will never know the things that lead down
to disillusion and to death. It is incorruptible. And what
is it precisely? Look at the text. He identifies
it, but of incorruptible through the word of God, which lives
and abides. What is that divine seed which
begets divine life? It is the divine Word. It is
the Word of God. Now some say that the translation
should be, that it is the Word of God who is living and abiding. But I believe the context points
to the translation that most of you have, that the words living
and abiding refer not to God, but to that word by which we
are begotten again. That seed shares in the very
qualities and attributes of God, who is the living and the abiding
God. Think for a moment with me briefly
on those two characteristics of this Word. It is a living
Word. Because as God is the living
God and can impart life, so He has given to His Word that which
can impart life. Hebrews 4.12, the Word of God
is living and active, the writer to the Hebrews says. Dr. Clowney in his helpful commentary
on First Peter writes, Peter compares the life-giving power
of the Word of God to human procreation. It is the seed of life, sown
in our hearts to create new life. God's word is created. He speaks
and it is done. He commands and it stands fast. And then quoting Psalm 33, by
the word of the Lord where the heavens made their starry host
by the breath of his mouth. Since God's word is his vocalized
breath, It goes forth with the power of His Spirit. All Scripture
is God-breathed. It is the out-breathing of God. And since it is His vocalized
breath, it goes forth with the power of His Spirit. The Word
of the Gospel is God's call. It communicates and converts.
Both Abraham and Sarah laughed at God's impossible word of promise. Will Sarah bear a child at the
age of 90? God replied, is there anything
too difficult for me? When the angel promised to Mary
an even more miraculous birth, she did not laugh, but she did
marvel. God repeated to her the word
that had been spoken to Sarah. No word of God shall be void
of power. God's word of promise is self-fulfilling. By the word of God, Jesus was
born of the Virgin Mary. And by the word of God, we are
born anew. The people of God respond to
the gospel call with the words of Mary's faith, May it be to
me as you have said. It is a living word by which
we are begotten again. The word that comes offering
life, the word that comes pleading with us to choose the way of
life is the very word which under the blessing of God imparts life.
And we are begotten again by a living word, but it's also
described as an abiding word, a word that remains, that does
not fade through erosion, does not pass away through death. It is permanent. It is unchanging. It is enduring. Jesus said heaven
and earth shall pass away, but my words shall never pass away. What that word promises in the
gospel and comes as a living word is a word that can be counted
upon in life and in death and on to judgment in the confidence
that bold shall we stand in his great day for who ought to our
charge shall lay fully absolved from these things we are from
sin and fear and death and shame. Now Peter will go on to amplify
what he says about the Word of God in verses 24 and 25, and
that must await a further exposition. But in summary, and in my final
word of application, let's come around full circle to where we
began. Peter, as a universal pastor, for that's what the apostles
were, he writes in chapter 5 as a fellow elder. He's concerned
for these young believers in Asia Minor. He has set before
them in broad scope something of the glory of their salvation.
He wants them as pilgrims on their way to the celestial city
to have an appreciation of the salvation that is theirs in Christ
and those dimensions that are yet to come. And after laying
out that marvelous salvation, he begins to call them to the
kind of life they are to live before God, a life of hope, a
life of holiness, a life of fear. And now he wants them, his fellow
travelers, to look around them and to see you've got others
in whose eyes gleam the glory of their hope, whose hearts are
set upon a life of universal holiness, who are walking in
that holy fear. They do not want to displease
their father, bring a frown upon the brow of their judge, or despise
in any way the awesome price of their redemption. Now he's
about to tell them one another, love, with a pure heart, fervently. But he says, before I give you
that command, I want you to know the prerequisites that God has
graciously wrought in your own heart. You have purified your
souls through your obedience to the truth unto unfeigned love
of the brethren, and you have been begotten again not of corruptible
seed, but of incorruptible by the Word of God, which lives
and abides forever, and furnished with those two realities, the
purification of your souls and the divine beginning, you are
now equipped to give yourself to loving one another. Now, in
so doing, you see that Peter is once again underscoring a
principle I've already thundered from this booklet on numerous
occasions, even in this series of expositions, that Peter is
once again setting before us the great truth that only a true
Christian can live the Christian life. Only a true Christian can live
the Christian life. Who can fervently love one another? Only those who have purified
their souls through their obedience to the truth. Only those who
have been begotten again by the almighty life-transforming power
of God's grace in the gospel. That's what Peter's underscoring.
we must first of all possess in Christ the resources to begin
to manifest the grace and the love of Christ in our relationship
one to another. I've stated it this way, the
imperatives of the Christian life grow out of the indicatives
of Christian privilege. It's what God says we are and
have by His grace that lies at the foundation of what we are
to be and to do in response to that grace. In the words of Jesus,
you make the tree good and the fruit good. Only the good tree
brings forth good fruit. And could it be, and this is
the final application I want to lay on the consciences of
some of you this morning, could it be that this is the answer
to the question that has vexed some of you for years. I can
read my Bible, I can be relatively faithful in devotions, I can
come regularly to church and the stage meetings and the prayer
meetings, but when it comes to this business of loving the brethren,
having genuine brotherly affection, that's the word used in verse
22, unto unsaying brotherly affection, And then as we shall see the
higher, more demanding form of love in the imperative, agapa'o,
constantly be engaged in the expressions of this love of intelligence
and principle and volition, one toward another, from the heart
and that fervently. Nothing but a history of tragic
defeat. You can't forgive freely one
of the most fundamental acts of love. You can't cover over
the faults of others freely and quickly. You cannot bear with
the foibles of others. You are supercritical, hypercritical,
judgmental, censorious. These are the patterns of your
life. Could it be that the problem
is you've never purified your soul? You've never known a true
saving response to the gospel. Or Peter could say, having put
away, therefore, wickedness and guile and hypocrisy and envies
and evil speakings, you have known the purification of your
soul. Could it be, my friend, don't
be angry when I raise the question, but could it be that that's why
you can't make any progress in loving your brothers and sisters? You just don't have the This
soul has never been purified. John can say by this we know
we pass from death unto life because we love the brethren.
Loving the brethren is not an impossible, unattainable ideal. It is a reality to us because
of the divine forgiveness. Could it be I only ask the question? More importantly, I ask you to
ask the And for those of us who can say,
Lord, by your grace I do know what it is, not perfectly but
principally and really and with growing grace, to love my brethren. Dear fellow travelers, when we
find it difficult to love, somewhere along the line we have been grieving
and quenching the Spirit who has brought us, through our obedience
to the truth, unto unfamed love of the brethren. Let us ask God
to show us where we've grieved and quenched the Spirit, where
we have acted or thought or retained dispositions contrary to the
whole tendency of that new life that has been imparted, which
is a life of love as well as a life of holiness. Let us ask
God to deal with us that we might know what it is in the context
of an ungrieved Holy Spirit to love one another. Let us pray. Our Father, we are so thankful
for the scriptures, which are indeed a lamp to our feet and
a light to our pathway. And we pray that you would take
this portion of your word that we have studied this morning,
and may it be a word of life and power to our hearts. We thank
you that your word is a living and an abiding word, and we pray
that with your blessing it may be the instrument of the divine
begetting even in this place this morning. O Lord, we ask
that some may purify their souls by obedience to the truth, by
a faith response to the gospel even in this place today. Seal
then your word to our hearts, lead us in our understanding,
and so fill us with your spirit that we may indeed love one another
from the heart, fervently, with unhypocritical brotherly affection. Hear us, seal your word for our
good and your glory, we plead through Christ our Lord. Amen.